Close Encounters offers new critical approaches to science fiction as represented in film, television, and fan culture. Ranging from historical analysis and interpretation to psychoanalytic critique, and from avantgarde films to television sitcoms, this volume addresses the ways in which conventional notions of sexual difference are reworked by science fiction.

Historically, science fiction has constructed new categories of masculinity and femininity through the shifting, ambiguous, and contradictory sexual status it ascribes to androids, aliens, and robots. Close Encounters demonstrates the contribution that feminist media theorists have made to our understanding of these brave and strange new worlds through their reworking of semiology, psychoanalysis, and reception theory over the last decade. Originally published in part as an issue of Camera Obscura, this volume includes several new essays as well as the complete text of Peter Wollen’s film script for Friendship’s Death.